Oberheim OB-Xa

The sound of the 80's, right at your fingertips. The quintessential analog polysynth, used by countless artists and still lusted over by synth heads worldwide. The OB-Xa (or this one anyway) is an 8-voice, 2-oscillator synthesizer with 120 programmable patch locations and Curtis (CEM) chips. They did make the OB-Xa in different voice configurations (4, 6 and 8 voice). As many know, this synth was in direct competition and comparison with the Prophet-5 by Sequential Circuits. The later Prophet-5 revisions used Curtis chips like the Oberheim so sound-wise they could get similar, though many argue that there there is still a huge difference between the two. I personally like the OB-Xa for the fact that it has 8 voices, plus the sound is huge.

In this video, we did a direct comparison of the OB-Xa with the newer, 8-voice OB-8.